Of Petrol Promises, Political Seduction And Matters Arising

Campaign season is here, and with it comes the yearly ritual of Nigerian politicians turning into men wooing a lady they have no intention of marrying. They will say anything. Promise anything. And somewhere in the back of their minds, they know most of it cannot be delivered.

Borrowing a line from the Italian football journalist Fabrizio Romano, whose “Here We Go” has become shorthand for confirmed transfer news, I dare say Nigeria’s own version has arrived. Except in our own version, “here we go” does not mean a deal is done. It means the promises are about to start flying, and none of them come with a medical or a signed contract.

Two things move the needle on the cost of living in this country more than anything else: the price of fuel at the pump and the naira’s exchange rate against the dollar. Touch either one and you have touched the nerve centre of the average Nigerian’s daily survival. So it is no surprise that as the 2027 race takes shape, our presidential candidates have gone straight for both, one after the other, like men queuing up outside the same lady’s gate.

Let’s start with the former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, now flying the flag of the African Democratic Congress. He has promised to restore the fuel subsidy and has thrown in a promise to cancel student loans for good measure. A WhatsApp forward making the rounds joked that Atiku would soon promise Arsenal fans in Nigeria the Champions League if it would win him a vote. Funny, yes. But not far off from how this game is actually played. Promise the moon, and if the lady does not ask too many questions, promise her Mars as well.

Not wanting to be left behind, Adewole Adebayo, the Social Democratic Party’s candidate, has promised to bring petrol, cooking gas and aviation fuel down to N200 per litre within twelve months of taking office. His plan, on paper, involves rehabilitating public refineries, supporting modular refineries, and reserving Nigerian crude for Nigerian consumption before it goes anywhere near an export terminal. He has also promised to cap housing costs at seven percent of a worker’s salary and transport costs at six percent. These are not small numbers. If achievable, they would represent real relief for millions of struggling Nigerians. That is the question mark though. If.

Then there is Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim of the Accord party, who has put a specific figure on the table: N605 per litre as his “starting sustainable price,” with room to fall to between N200 and N300 once production costs and the exchange rate are brought under control. He insists this is not a return to subsidy, and he describes the old justification for subsidy removal as “accounting magic.” That is a clever line, and I will give him credit for at least attempting to show his working rather than simply throwing a number at a crowd and hoping nobody asks how he arrived at it.

And then, of course, there is Peter Obi, whose promise this time round is not about naira and kobo but about time itself. He says he will serve only one term, and in that single term he will reverse what he calls the rot of over sixty years. Wonderful news, if true. Sixty years of accumulated dysfunction, undone in four. I have covered Nigerian politics long enough to know that even our most disciplined leaders have needed more than a single term to move the needle on infrastructure alone, let alone institutional decay that predates most of these candidates’ birth certificates. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had eight years. Goodluck Jonathan had six. Neither left us anywhere close to the promised land.

Here is where I want to be fair, because it would be lazy of me to dismiss all of this as noise. Adewole Adebayo and Olawepo-Hashim, unlike some of their rivals, have at least attempted to show their arithmetic. Rehabilitating refineries, reserving crude for local use, capping housing and transport costs as a share of income .these are the kinds of specifics that separate a policy conversation from a campaign jingle. Say what you want about whether the numbers eventually add up, but at least they have given Nigerians something concrete to interrogate.

That is more than I can say for candidates who promise lower prices without telling Nigerians how they intend to get there. Anybody can promise N200 petrol. The real question is what happens to the NNPC’s balance sheet, what happens to the naira, what happens to the marginal cost of importing when our own refineries are still running below capacity. Nigerians were told, in the build-up to the 2023 subsidy removal, that the savings would flow into roads, hospitals and schools. Pump prices jumped from roughly N185 to well over N1000 per litre in the months that followed.

This is the trap our politicians keep setting for us, and we keep falling into it every four years. They know Nigerians are hurting. They know the average household spends a frightening share of its income on transport and cooking fuel alone. So they reach for the two levers guaranteed to get a reaction  petrol and dollars  and they pull as hard as they can, whether or not the machinery on the other end can actually deliver.

Notice, too, how quiet most of these same candidates go the moment the conversation shifts from petrol to the naira itself. It is one thing to promise a price at the pump. It is another thing entirely to explain how you intend to defend a currency that has been on a downward slide for years, under governments of every political colour. You cannot promise N200 petrol while staying silent on where the dollars to import refined products, spare parts and refinery equipment are supposed to come from. The two questions are joined at the hip, and any candidate who answers one without touching the other is only telling half the story, possibly the half that sounds better on a campaign poster.

I have also not forgotten that some of these same candidates, or the parties they now lead, have been in government before, at state or federal level, with chances to fix exactly the things they are now promising to fix. Power has a way of making yesterday’s minister into today’s reformer, once the seat changes and the microphone points somewhere else. Nigerians would do well to ask not just what a candidate is promising for 2027, but what he did with the opportunities he already had.

Mind you, I am not saying the subsidy conversation is illegitimate. Far from it. The subsidy regime this country ran for decades was a cesspool of fraud, and anyone who tells you otherwise either benefited from it or has not been paying attention. But there is a difference between a serious candidate explaining how the subsidy math has to change and a candidate promising a specific naira figure eighteen months before an election, with no refinery capacity data, no forward market numbers, and no explanation of what happens to the exchange rate between now and inauguration day.

Like I have said previously on this page, the era of blanket promises should be over. Nigerians deserve the how, not just the what. Anybody chasing a vote can promise cheaper fuel and a stronger naira. It takes an entirely different level of seriousness to explain, in public, with numbers that can be checked and challenged, exactly how you intend to move this country from where it stands to where you say you are taking it.

So here is my prescription, and it is a simple one. Before any of these candidates gets another rally, another town hall, another prime-time interview, Nigerians and the journalists covering this race should be asking one question and refusing to move on until it is answered properly: show your working. What does your refinery rehabilitation timeline actually look like, and who is financing it? What happens to FAAC allocations if crude is reserved for local refining at the volumes you are promising? What exchange rate is your ₦200 petrol projection even built on? A candidate who cannot answer these on the spot has no business making the promise in the first place.

Until our politicians start answering those questions instead of trading headline figures like Christmas gift promises, this is exactly what campaign season will remain: men wooing a lady with promises they know, deep down, they may never keep. The lady, in this case, is over two hundred million Nigerians who have heard this song before and are still waiting for the wedding.